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by fiatmoney 3836 days ago
People like to blame antibiotic resistance on farms, but human populations with high rates of infection and transmission who aren't good at taking the full course of (or any) drugs are a more immediate problem. Increasing rates of drug-resistant tuberculosis and STDs aren't due to farm animals.
3 comments

The best evidence today actually says that you don't need to finish your course [0]. Not that you are wrong in the human consumption aspect. but finishing courses could strengthen resistance and spread of resistant organisms by creating a selective pressure in the organism (the human) to only have bacterial colonization from those that are resistant

[0] https://www.mja.com.au/insight/2015/5/stop-antibiotics-exper...

While that's interesting I don't think it's "best evidence".

Unfortunately our mechanisms for determining best evidence are woefully slow, complex, and expensive. Systematic reviews, for instance. Either this process needs to be improved (an excellent candidate for AI) or a nearly-as-good surrogate needs to be supported by policy makers.

what are your thoughts on how an AI would perform this task?
My thoughts on this are loosely formed :)

However....

The systematic review and meta-analyses processes involve reading screeds of text and data; organising it; analysing it; weighing it against measures of quality; and conducting (often counter-intuitive) statistical procedures.

This is the sort of thing that takes humans a loooooong time and is prone to error. A domain-specific AI would surely excel at tasks like this.

Animals can contract TB, so that doesn't support your case very well. That's why the sale of raw milk is illegal in the US.
> Increasing rates of drug-resistant tuberculosis and STDs aren't due to farm animals.

Do you have any evidence for that or is it just how you think adaptation transmission works; and do you have evidence that - if the former holds - these examples are representative of the general case?